Who killed Dele Giwa: 40 years without answers

Forty years after Dele Giwa’s assassination, as the question of who killed him remains unanswered, journalism veterans are shifting the focus from demanding justice to celebrating his fearless journalism and urging a new generation to sustain his legacy, writes WALE AKINSELURE

For 40 years, October 19 has remained a grim reminder of one of the darkest chapters in Nigerian journalism: the assassination of Dele Giwa, the founding Editor-in-Chief of Newswatch magazine, by a parcel bomb delivered to his Lagos residence. On October 19, 1986, Giwa was in his study at No. 25 Talabi Street, Ikeja, Lagos, with his colleague and Newswatch co-founder, Kayode Soyinka, when a parcel was delivered to the house. A Peugeot 404 had pulled up at the gate bearing the package, which was received by Giwa’s security guard and handed to his young son, Billy, who took it to his father.

The padded envelope bore an instruction that it should be opened only by the addressee, identified as “Chief Dele Giwa”. With the parcel resting on his lap, Giwa tore open its top-left corner. A devastating explosion followed, tearing through his lower body and shaking the room.

Soyinka, who was sitting across the table, recalled a huge ball of fire engulfing the room. His hair was partially burnt, while the massive mahogany L-shaped table at which the two men had been eating offered him some protection. The explosion also perforated his eardrums, leaving him with hearing impairment for five years.

Giwa did not die immediately. He was rushed to First Foundation Medical Centre, Opebi, Ikeja, where doctors struggled to save him.

One of the doctors on duty, Dr Dokun Adedeji, recalled how Giwa arrived at about 12.30 pm in a bus, accompanied by his friend, Dr Tosin Ajayi. Wrapped in a blood-soaked white sheet, the journalist was taken into the emergency room.

For about 30 minutes, Giwa remained conscious, asking questions and expressing the hope that he would survive.

“What I saw, I have never seen again since in my practice. He was shattered. His two limbs were open, and he was bleeding. He said that I should move the bed up so that he could breathe. I did. I was shaking. But we kept on,” Adedeji recalled.

He said Giwa asked him in Yoruba, “Dokun, se mi o ni ku sha? (Dokun, I hope I will not die?)”

Dr Adedeji said the injuries were so extensive that survival would have been unlikely even if Giwa had lived through the immediate aftermath.

Even in his agony, he recounted that Giwa repeatedly asked about his wife, Funmi, and his youngest daughter, Aisha, who had crawled into the dining area after the explosion.

“How is Aisha? Do you know anything about Aisha?” he reportedly asked at the hospital.

For Nosa Igiebor, who served as Newswatch’s Deputy Editor-in-Chief, the memory of that day remains inseparable from the anger and helplessness that followed the killing.

Igiebor had arrived at the magazine’s office for the day’s work when, barely five minutes later, Soyinka telephoned to inform him of the attack. At Giwa’s residence, he recalled seeing parts of his friend’s body scattered around the room.

His anger deepened when Ajayi uncovered Giwa’s body to show him and other journalist colleagues the extent of the injuries.

“I was consumed by anger. It is unfathomable how someone could be killed in such a brutal manner,” Igiebor said.

Giwa’s fears before the killing

Giwa was only 39, but he had already established himself as one of Nigeria’s most accomplished and fearless investigative journalists. Known for his elegant prose, sharp intellect and uncompromising criticism, he demanded accountability from those in power and sought to expose the inner workings of government.

Yet, in the days preceding his death, he had reportedly expressed fears that his life was in danger.

His assassination came two days after he was questioned by officials of the State Security Service over his journalism.

One issue that had attracted official attention was an article he wrote about the second-tier foreign exchange market, a policy introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria to determine the naira’s exchange rate and allocate foreign exchange according to market forces.

In the article, Giwa warned of the consequences of the policy failing, predicting that Nigerians would take to the streets and stone their leaders.

Kunle Togun, then Deputy Director of the State Security Service, subsequently met with Giwa over the article’s contents. Separately, Halilu Akilu of the Directorate of Military Intelligence questioned him over an allegation that he had been heard discussing the importation of arms with some individuals.

Following the assassination, rumours also linked Giwa’s death to investigations into the whereabouts of Gloria Okon, who was alleged to have been a drug courier for influential figures before her reported detention by the police. The circumstances surrounding these allegations have remained contentious.

The question of whether Giwa’s journalism and his encounters with security officials were connected to his murder has haunted the profession for four decades.

Speaking at the public presentation of Dele Giwa’s Granite Journalism at the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, Lagos, on Monday, veteran journalist and former Ogun State Governor, Olusegun Osoba, recalled that Giwa had voiced his fears just a day before the killing.

Osoba said they attended a lunch on October 18, 1986, hosted by Wole Adeosun, the former managing director of NAL Merchant Bank, who wanted to thank the media for helping him regain his position after his chairman had dismissed him.

During the gathering, Giwa complained that certain people were pursuing him, Osoba recalled. Concerned, the group decided to take the matter to Augustus Aikhomu, then Vice-President under the military administration of General Ibrahim Babangida, at the Naval House.

“I told him that we had a problem on our hands: some elements in the security services were after Dele. We presented the case, and Aikhomu promised to do something about it,” Osoba said.

The following morning, Osoba received a telephone call informing him that Giwa had been attacked.

“I had to rush from Kopa Road to Ikeja, only to find his body, with his lap already torn to pieces. I held him and said, ‘Dele! Dele!! Dele!!!’ What happened?” he recalled.

40 years without justice

For 40 years, one question has refused to disappear from public discourse: Who killed Dele Giwa?

Journalists, writers and human rights activists, like Dare Babarinsa, have repeatedly demanded answers, with several chroniclers of the period pointing to the military government under Babangida. The former military ruler has consistently denied involvement in the assassination.

Among those who fought most persistently for justice was the late human rights lawyer, Gani Fawehinmi. He initiated 38 separate legal actions and made more than 200 court appearances before 24 judges in his efforts to bring senior military intelligence officials to account.

Fawehinmi particularly implicated Togun and Akilu. However, the legal proceedings did not produce convictions, and subsequent inquiries, including the Oputa Panel on Human Rights Violations, failed to result in criminal prosecutions.

Until he died in 2009, Fawehinmi remained unable to secure a conviction over Giwa’s murder. To date, nobody has been convicted for the killing.

Babangida restated his position in his autobiography, A Journey in Service, arguing that the media’s adversarial relationship with the government had undermined the investigation.

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“It was an attitude of ‘we versus the government’ that has remained today. It is a situation in which the government is adjudged guilty even before the evidence in a case is adduced,” he wrote.

He added that when the Obasanjo civilian administration reopened the case at the Oputa Panel, he expected the police and lawyers to present new evidence from their investigations.

“Nothing of such happened. The Giwa, like all mysterious murders, has remained unsolved after so many years. I keep hoping it will be uncovered in our lifetime or after us. More often than not, mysterious crimes are solved long after their commission,” Babangida wrote.

The competing positions have done little to resolve the central issue. While the former military ruler has rejected suggestions of his involvement, journalists and activists have continued to demand a credible account of the killing and accountability for those responsible.

At the 40th-anniversary memorial, however, the emphasis was not solely on the unresolved murder but also on preserving Giwa’s contributions to journalism.

For Ray Ekpu, a veteran journalist and Newswatch co-founder, the presentation of Dele Giwa’s Granite Journalism was an opportunity to confront both the pain of an unresolved assassination and the enduring significance of Giwa’s work.

Ekpu said Newswatch and members of the media community had worked for years with Fawehinmi to seek justice, but their efforts were frustrated by what he described as “the forces of oppression”.

“So, at this point, all we can do is to leave the criminals who assassinated our partner, friend and brother in the able hands of God Almighty because the good Lord says vengeance is mine,” he said.

Ekpu said the book was not intended simply to mourn Giwa but to “give presence to his absence”.

His words captured the paradox of Giwa’s place in Nigerian journalism: a man whose life was brutally cut short, but whose writing and professional example have continued to command attention long after his death.

Ekpu also described journalism as a dangerous profession, pointing to the risks reporters face while covering protests, riots, political campaigns and wars.

For Igiebor, the failure to bring Giwa’s killers to justice reflected a wider problem of accountability in Nigeria. He drew a parallel with the assassination of former Attorney-General of the Federation, Bola Ige, who was killed at his home in Ibadan in 2001, noting that his killers had also not been convicted.

“We know those who killed Dele Giwa, but nothing can be done anymore. When you demand that people be held to account, it is a problem in Nigeria. Even a serving Attorney-General, Bola Ige, was killed and the killers have not been convicted. It is not how long you live but how well. Dele Giwa inspired us a lot,” Igiebor said.

His assertion reflected the depth of conviction among some of Giwa’s contemporaries, although no court has established criminal responsibility for the journalist’s murder.

The pen that outlived him

While the circumstances of Giwa’s death remain unresolved, his contemporaries insist that his legacy should not be defined by the parcel bomb alone.

The founder and publisher of Vanguard Newspapers, Sam Amuka, who chaired the memorial, described Giwa as a patriotic journalist who spoke truth to power without sentimentality.

Recalling Giwa’s popular saying, “Protest pays”, Amuka said the statement had proved particularly relevant in the Nigerian context.

“He had a razor-sharp pen. He was the conscience of press freedom. He had a fierce intellect. His prose was a cousin to poetry,” Amuka said.

He noted that four decades after Giwa’s death, journalists were still gathering to honour a man who had lived for only 39 years.

“We are all here, after 40 years, honouring a 39-year-old man. The people who killed him, how many people can remember them now?” he asked.

Former chairman of Insight Communications, Biodun Shobanjo, urged the gathering to celebrate rather than mourn Giwa, describing him as an extraordinary journalist whose influence extended beyond his lifetime.

“Dele can never die; his legacies remain,” he said.

Professor of Mass Communication Ralph Akinfeleye described Giwa as a practitioner of journalism of conscience, lamenting what he considered a shortage of journalists who uphold that ideal.

“We have a shortage of journalists of conscience,” he said.

ThisDay founder, Nduka Obaigbena, recalled the large crowd that attended Giwa’s burial, recounting Amuka’s observation at the time that “Journalism is a constitution of Nigeria. And you can kill it, but it won’t die.”

The tributes converged on a common message: although Giwa was killed, the ideals associated with his journalism had outlived him.

At the memorial, the emphasis on Giwa’s legacy was accompanied by a challenge to younger journalists: to preserve the courage, intellectual rigour and commitment to public interest that distinguished his work.

Four decades after the parcel bomb ended his life, Giwa remains a reference point in conversations about press freedom, courage and the responsibility of the media.

Reviewing Dele Giwa’s Granite Journalism, Simon Kolawole, publisher of TheCable, described Giwa as a martyr of press freedom, a compelling storyteller and a writer of uncommon gifts.

Kolawole argued that Giwa’s distinction lay not merely in his courage or willingness to challenge authority, but also in his mastery of the written word.

“Giwa belonged to that rare class of journalists who could transform seemingly ordinary experiences into fascinating stories. His prose was lucid, elegant, playful and frequently provocative. He had an enviable ability to engage the reader from the opening sentence and sustain that engagement until the last full stop,” he said.

He added that Giwa understood that good writing was not about displaying an impressive vocabulary but communicating ideas in ways that informed, entertained and stimulated thought.

“He could be profound without being ponderous. He could be critical without sacrificing humour. He could discuss complicated political questions without losing the ordinary reader,” Kolawole said.

For Kolawole, Giwa’s journalism was inseparable from a sense of public responsibility.

“Here was a writer who understood that journalism was not merely a profession for earning a living. It was also a public responsibility,” he added.

Forty years after the assassination, Kolawole said, Giwa’s writing remained relevant because it could still command attention, challenge assumptions and offer readers considerable pleasure.

“The tragedy is that we shall never know what more he might have written, what further heights he might have attained or how much richer Nigerian journalism might have become through his continued presence. But we can celebrate what he left behind,” he said.